Honest question: What does GPT-3 add to my tookbox as a developer?
We're still figuring that out. It's a really fascinating piece of tech, and has all kinds of non-obvious applications. I wrote about using it to explain code (and mathematical formulas and suchlike) a few weeks ago: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jul/9/gpt-3-explain-code/ I've been experimenting with using it to build a human-language-to-SQL tool, so that people can ask questions of their data "what country had the h…
OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
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Re: OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've started asking GPT-3 for relationship advice. It's often... insightful. There is a bit of prompt engineering. If you start your question with things like "As a qualified therapist, what would you recommend to" .... There is also a bit of engineering with the question. I often ask about an analogous situation, rather than my own. I'm not batting 100%, but I often get strategies and things to think about I wouldn'…
You can use GPT-3 for relationship advice, but should you? Could you elaborate a little more on what you're asking? Perhaps an example? I feel as if any use case like this, — particularly if it crosses into interpersonal relationships and disagreement — risks being incredibly dangerous as far as reinforcing your own biases. It should go without saying that to even consider this, you should have a solid grasp of the f…
With GPT-3, that bias is pretty explicit, and not hard to manage. I also don't treat advice as necessarily /good/ advice. A good way to think about it is ideation.
A good example is to ask how to communicate something. I sometimes miscommunicate what I'm thinking, and it often takes a lot of effort to figure out how to say something. With different prompts, GPT-3 will give different ways to say something, and I can pick one which works well and meets what I want to say. Let's say you promised someone something, and need to change plans, and you don't want them to think you're blowing them off. GPT-3 will often give me good ways to communicate something like that.
Or another example is: "I am struggling with ____. What are good strategies I can use to ____."
GPT-3 will often come up with things which I wouldn't have come up with myself, or ones which would have taken me a lot of time. Just as often, it will give a useless, generic list of suggestions. At the end of the day, though, it provides helpful ideas often enough to be valuable.
GPT-3 definitely doesn't (and shouldn't) act as an arbiter in a conflict, but even in conflicts, there's often a solution which works for both sides. My major problem is that I tend to think slowly, and come up with those solutions too late. GPT-3 thinks a lot faster than I do, and having those ideas before they're moot is sometimes helpful.
As a footnote, human therapists tend to reinforce biases too. They only have one side of the story. I've seen people really damaged in the way you describe. In one case, both the person and the therapist were living in a (plausible-sounding) fantasy world.
Re: OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
making things cheap encourages experimentation and paradoxically increases total spend
hence the generous free tier. You want it to be big enough for a team of developers to do all the experimentation and development work, and also to launch a product to a small audience. As soon as your product is a success, you run out of free tier, and you will have to negotiate a price with the sales team. If I were OpenAI, then while I had a market leading product, the price would be 'I want half the profit margin…
This degenerates to Oracle's "how much is your data worth to you" pricing model.
Re: OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've started asking GPT-3 for relationship advice. It's often... insightful. There is a bit of prompt engineering. If you start your question with things like "As a qualified therapist, what would you recommend to" .... There is also a bit of engineering with the question. I often ask about an analogous situation, rather than my own. I'm not batting 100%, but I often get strategies and things to think about I wouldn'…
You can use GPT-3 for relationship advice, but should you? Could you elaborate a little more on what you're asking? Perhaps an example? I feel as if any use case like this, — particularly if it crosses into interpersonal relationships and disagreement — risks being incredibly dangerous as far as reinforcing your own biases. It should go without saying that to even consider this, you should have a solid grasp of the f…
I asked GPT-3 for advice for how to interpret that person's behavior (with more context).
GPT-3 gave several plausible explanations, must of which I hadn't thought of.
Re: OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
#205This makes me sad. I hoped to see less use of language models in the wild; looks like we're heading the other direction. I was recently able to articulate to myself why I dislike language models like GPT-3 so much. Language is fundamentally about communication . I have a mental state, and language lets me share that some of that mental state with another human being. It's quite remarkable, and the cornerstone for pre…
I thought this was interesting so I literally pasted the entire thing into OpenAI's playground and asked DaVinci to write a rebuttal of your argument. Here is what it said: --- There are a few problems with LukeV's argument. First, he conflates the ability to generate human-like text with the ability to communicate. Just because GPT-3 can generate text that sounds like it was written by a human does not mean that it…